Let’s get this rolling with a high-brow, quality filled and intelligent discussion…

You’ve just won £1.7 million on the lotto. You’ve just got back for celebrating in Vegas and after researching how to remove the Maori tattoo from your face, you’ve sat down how to sort your money out.

How much would you spend on cars and what would you buy?

Having only had a pint, and reserving the right to change my mind the drinker I get and again when I’m sober, I think I’d buy three cars:

£1.7 million is an oddly-specific number. Are you trying to tell us something, and is the drinking celebratory???

I’d probably go for a Ferrari 288 GTO (not in white, thank you Mr Evans), an Alfa Giulia GT modified by Alfaholics, a Mk1 MX-5 for when it’s sunny and a Mercedes E63 AMG as my practical choice. And a Holden SS Ute.

And although I hate the footballer connotations of a Bentley Conti GT, I do like the idea of a Bentley Continental Flying Star shooting brake (Google it, if you don’t know it)

The new Vanquish. And re: £1.7m, I read somewhere about the average Wednesday lotto winner these days but I’m probably wrong.

Love the list and the Bentley is my secret ‘like’ too but you’ve got it wrong with the Merc- no soul.

Also, you’ve spent a helluva lot of your winnings. Are you so loaded that you don’t need to buy a house… Or give some to family… Or charity etc.. :lol:

Half the problem is ‘how much?’, not ‘what?’ My wife and I once had a proper heated discussion on how much we would give to family members and which friends. Quite bizarre considering we hadn’t even won a tenner!!

Ok, £1.7 million. At a rough guess that would give me £1 million to invest for income, which should allow me to work much much less and enjoy some of the toys.
Then £350K to add to the sale of my property to buy somewhere with a bit of space, and a large barn for me to start to fill.
That only leaves me £350k to spend on cars.
The first £50k will go on a daily driver. That will be a VXR8 estate (manual of course). For days when RWD isnt going to get me anywhere i think a Jeep Wrangler (petrol manual of course)so thats another £30k
I have always fancied an old Lambo or 2. An Islero or maybe an Espada (or both).
And an E-Type, a 4.2 soft top. These 3 have probably used about £200,000 of the available budget. That lot should keep me entertained, and still leave a little for looking after them
Maybe i should buy a ticket one day

I would make a point of buying one item of designer clothing, probably up to £1000, just to say I’ve done it once.

Next, I’d do a major extension to the garage, which would involve excavating into a hillside in my back garden. I’m going to need maybe £600k for that.

£400k would go on 2 sensible houses for my children (buys quite a lot round here), for them to rent out until they need them. After all, they can’t live in the boot of a GT forever.

The remaining £700k would go on cars, but not all at once. I’d buy a run-out special of the current V8 M3 (manual), as I think its the last stand for this type of Beemer, and may become something of a classic in time.

My other half loves the Maserati Gran Cabrio, so I’d probably use one of the new garage slots on one of those.

Being a pleb, I’d keep a chunk to one side to swap the Supersports for the new Supersports thats due next year.

Finally, in a couple of years, I’d probably swap the SL63 for an F12, which looks utterly fabulous.

This list will be out of date tomorrow, so if I happen to win it next week, I’ll make a polite announcement on these pages and let you know what I did with it all.

As it is a trifling amount, £1.7million, I wouldn’t go too mad on the cars. I would probably go for a Quattroporte, a RWD Gallardo Spider (or RWD 911GTS Cabrio), and a 135i. They could all be used, actually, so long as the miles are low and the config is right for me.

I’m not interested in property, so the remaining £1.5 million, or so, would be split into investment and a boat.

Angus Young wrote:458 Italia… of course.
Focus ST. That’s as close to ‘family car’ as I’m going.

911. A while a go when I got banned I had one on loan so my other half had to drive me round in it for a few days before it went back and she’s been nagging me to buy one ever since.

Is 1.7 enough for me to get an Aventador as well? Or would that be a bit rash?

A bit rash? Only if you don’t need the £1.7m for anything else!!

Didn’t realise you got banned, I thought you upto away with it on a technicality for a 100mph+ dash on the motorway? What did you get banned for?

Focus ST: Get the estate, it’s got a much nicer rear end unlike LGs… Speaking of which, if you have a large bottom, you’ll change your mind as the bucket seats are clearly designed by a size zero woman!

Didn’t realise you got banned, I thought you upto away with it on a technicality for a 100mph+ dash on the motorway? What did you get banned for?

Yes, it was the 100+ I got banned for. The technicality was that the cop who pulled me was to be trained on the piece of kit he recorded me on later that week which meant that he wasn’t allowed to cite the 126 he reckoned I was doing but was only allowed to say “in excess of 100mph”. Hence I only got two weeks and no points. I was told I’d have got a lot more if they could have used the 126 figure. Mind you, he was wrong about 126. I was in a Focus 1.6 Zetec which had an official top speed of 116. So given that cars rarely do what the manufacturer claims I must have been way off his claim. I didn’t go down well when I pointed this out. I refrained from telling him what I’d been doing in a Bentley on the same stretch of road the day before.

Focus ST: Get the estate, it’s got a much nicer rear end unlike LGs… Speaking of which, if you have a large bottom, you’ll change your mind as the bucket seats are clearly designed by a size zero woman!

Haven’t tried the new on yet, but the one I had a while back had really nice seats. Didn’t even feel too high to me, which is something you read a lot. Anyway, despite being a man of a certain age I am still blessed with snake hips!

It would, indeed, be nice to get a few fresh faces and it not just be a straight transplant from the Autocar forum. That was the hope upon the refresh at Autocar but, of course, all we seemed to get was trolls and spam. I’m sure there’s plenty of good conversation to be had at Pistonheads, but trying to find it might be a full time job with the size of the place.

The forum has now been running about 10 days or so, and the initial response has been better than I had expected. Obviously, the sudden closing of the Autocar forum just after I created this one has had a short-term benefit, and it has given things a bit of a kick-start. I was expecting to be spending a month or so talking to myself!

The number of views of forum pages relative to the number of actual posts is still very high, so there are clearly plenty of people who are having a look but who have yet to jump in. Hopefully, as it evolves, various topics and threads will appear which create more conversation and entice more people to join. I’m pleased that people have been creating new threads rather than just commenting on ones I have started, and I think it will gradually grow.

As yet, we have only had a couple of lame attempts at spam, which I have been able to remove very quickly. Interestingly, given the immediate appearance of anti-Autocar trolls over at Pistonheads, none have shown their faces here as yet and I very much hope it stays that way!

The next step is to create a car reviews template, so people can create their own personal bite-size reviews of cars they ave owned or driven – I just need to spend some time researching and creating the template so it can be done with a bit of consistency. It will be a similar sort of thing to what you see on Honest John or Auto Trader, but hopefully with the experience and knowledge of you lot, it will have a bit more intelligence than they often get. Again, it will hopefully provide food for discussion among more car enthusiasts and encourage more to join.

Stu glad to see you are an Alfaholics fan. In 1990 I bought a 1974 1600 GT Junior from him, an absolute honey of car which I had to sell back to him in 1995 because of my move to the US. He shuffled me between his house and the station a couple of times in a BX and a CX diesel estate. Boy did he drive fa-ast but so smooth. Glad to see his little boys have grown up into the business.

Wouldn’t go too mad. I’d spend £5K-£6K on my old Merc with sorting out the rusty wings and parking scars with a re-spray, a freshened up suspension and the mother of all services being the priorities. Having done that, lotto win or not, I’d be too bloody mean too part with it till I’d got my money’s worth (another 100k miles at least) which would save me a fortune on the depreciation buying a new E Class would cost me.
The MX5 would go and as good a Boxter Spyder as I could find would take its place. Might treat myself to a previous shape Panda 100hp as a runaround a Kawasaki ER6 and a new mountainbike and I’d be a happy happy man.

By my rough calculation TBH, you’re only spending £60k ish on cars…. so what are you doing with the rest?! Being half Italian, I was expecting a Maserati, a Ferrai FF or putting your money down as a deposit for the impending Lambo SUV to take your dogs with you… :wink:

rich_uk wrote:By my rough calculation TBH, you’re only spending £60k ish on cars…. so what are you doing with the rest?! Being half Italian, I was expecting a Maserati, a Ferrai FF or putting your money down as a deposit for the impending Lambo SUV to take your dogs with you…

There was a time when a fistfull of dollars would have resulted in a super/hypercar fest a motorbike which could spin its backwheel while the front pawed the air all at 100mph and then some, a horse that could jumo over the moon and some pushbikes so light I’d need to tie them down so they didn’t float off. Premature death or perminant disability would probably been the result.

Am 48 and slowing down Rich. Me old Merc getting the getting-on-a-bit makeover and a nice Spyder (prob the best drivers soft-top there is) will do me fine.

As for the rest? I’d need a lot of time and thought before I started to spend.